If you disrupted class in the 1980’s, you got taken out of general population, and put into special education with a high ratio of teachers or aides, and received a proximity of attention as needed, and that was your generalized clinical marker for genuine problems. The consensus of the elementary grade day-care center we call kindergarten through fifth grade in public schools resolved who was incapable of participating at a reasonable level.
Meanwhile, being a weirdo with eccentricities and preferences wasn’t something that demanded medication and diagnosis and labels and highly precise rules for what’s normal and what’s not. You could be awkward. It wasn’t a big deal.
Now, that is no longer true. People are keeping score starting at five years old, boxing kids into limited futures of medication and unrelenting demands for strict behavioral protocols.
So, what changed? The schools. The doctors. The kids didn’t change. The adults did. The trend was to demand more from children, and thus force them into tighter constraints in adulthood. The trend was to try and force a society to do more with less, and to weed out the weak.
Kids have to do homework in kindergarten, and that is bullshit. They shouldn’t have homework until middle school, really. They should just be kids. They shouldn’t have anxiety about grades when they’re little. They should be permitted to exist as tiny little humans, getting a first look at a gigantic world. Up until age ten, they should just be exposed to what it means to be a person. By ten, their personality is developed, and with puberty around the corner, a few short years to tighten up the basics would work, if public schools were competent. Big if.
But, when it comes to “spectral autism” the premise is a joke. If you can brush your teeth, comb your hair, tie your shoes, and iron and fold clothes but choose not to then you aren’t autistic. If you’re capable of working at McDonald’s but choose not to then you aren’t autistic. If you could theoretically wait tables or tend a bar, as a capable server but choose not to then you aren’t autistic. If you can drive a car across town, you aren’t autistic.
Ain’t no spectrum about it. Either it’s debilitating pathology or it isn’t. People aren’t suffering from syndromes at unprecedented scales. The rules of society changed in the late 90’s, and judgement is passed with greater scrutiny than ever before.